Call it high art!
Abstract artist Crit Streed has literally put herself on a pedestal — OK, a converted hunting stand — where, nine feet in the air, she draws on a scroll all day, every day.
Streed started her piece, “A Survey of Drawing,” in a DUMBO gallery on Jan. 7, and it’s already 20 feet long.
The Iowan draws from 11 am to 6 pm — with a break for lunch at the local Peas and Pickles or Foragers — and sits up high so that her audience doesn’t focus on the drawing process.
It’s conceptual art, true, but a lot more tame than the participatory piece that remains the art world’s standard — Vito Acconci’s groundbreaking 1971 piece “Seedbed,” which featured Acconci masturbating in a private room underneath his fans.
But Streed distanced herself from the Acconci artwork, saying that her performance has nothing to do with the art.
“It’s not about someone watching me actually drawing,” said Streed, who has shown her work from Portugal to Kansas City. “It’s about the results of the drawing.”
That said, she admitted she was curious how having an audience present would affect her work.
“I wanted to see what would happen if I put myself in the public sphere,” Streed said. “I don’t plan these drawings, they just reveal themselves.”
Crit Streed’s “Contemporary Humanism” at A.I.R. Gallery [111 Front St., between Washington and Adams streets, (212) 255-6651], now through Feb. 1. For info,www.airgallery.org.
